National Network for Equitable Library Service

"Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinners and discourse. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings.

As the week opens, 50-something Hugh Argylle, owner of the Argylle Art Gallery, has a jarring fall from a ladder - a fall that leaves him with a fractured off-kilter vision of his own life and the lives of his friends, who are going through crises that leave them despairing, afraid, one half-step from going under emotionally or financially. Someone's going to have to fix all that, thinks Hugh - and it will probably be him.

In a drought-ridden Saskatchewan of the 1930s, self-possessed, enigmatic Elena finds herself living alone in the small village of Trevna. Her mother has been dead for many years, and her father, burdened by the hardships of drought, has disappeared, and the 18-year-old is an object of pity and charity in her community. But when a stranger shows up at a country dance, she needs only one look and one dance before jumping into his Lincoln Roadster, leaving the town and its shocked inhabitants behind.

A sizzling encounter that turned into a scorching biweekly affair. How he'd ended up in bed with a woman like Robin was still a mystery to Paul. One minute they were riding the same elevator and the next he was riding her, the attraction so fierce and immediate he couldn't remember how they reached his room or even shed their clothes. But when Robin suggested they take their relationship to the next level, Paul panicked, prompting her to walk out on him with her head held high and his heart in her hands.

Callie is shocked when her friend Ivy reappears after an unexplained three-year absence, but the girls pick up where they left off, and suddenly Callie's summer is full of parties, boys and fun. Beneath the surface, things aren't what they seem, however, and when a handsome boy with a dark past gets tangled up with Ivy, the girls' history threatens to destroy their future.

"Originally written in the mid-1950s, "Go Set a Watchman" was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to her publishers before "To Kill a Mockingbird". Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014. "Go Set a Watchman" features many of the characters from "To Kill a Mockingbird" some twenty years later. Returning home to Maycomb to visit her father, Jean Louise Finch - Scout - struggles with issues both personal and political, involving Atticus, society, and the small Alabama town that shaped her.

"Midnight Sweatlodge tells the tale of a group of strangers and family gathered together to partake in this ancient aboriginal ceremony. Each seeks healing from the ceremony and each character gives us a glimpse into their lives that is tearful and true"--Back cover.

When all the second grade students must enter the science fair, which has global warming as its theme, best friends Ivy and Bean team up to create an unusual project.